People
Love Börjeson, Director ✉️
I work as a director for KBLab. I’m also a Research Fellow at the Stockholm School of Economics, Center for Educational Leadership and Excellence (CELE). To a large extent, my job involves collocating data, competence, and computational resources.
I have a PhD in Industrial Organization and Economics and I have been a Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Fellow at the Computational Social Science Lab at Stanford University (School of Ed.). Academically/intellectually I would perhaps prefer to label myself as “some kind of sociologist”.
Martin Malmsten, Data scientist and IT architect ✉️
I work as a Data scientist at the lab and as an IT architect for the National Library. In these two roles I mainly focus on corpus creation, large transformer models, infrastructure design and prototyping. Having one foot in tech and data science and one in the library allows me to work strategically with larger questions such as where machine learning can be used to provide new insights into digital collections.
My background is in computer science and software development. Having implemented and worked closely with numerous metadata standards and systems I am a strong supporter of Linked (Open) Data as a paradigm and a way to connect information. My main driver is getting as much information and tools into the hands of as many people as possible.
Faton Rekathati, Data scientist ✉️
My first contact with KBLab was as an external researcher. In the spring of 2020 I wrote a masters thesis on the subject of curating news sections in historical newspapers. Over the summer I continued work on the same project as a research assistant for Linköping University, before eventually ending up as a Data scientist with KBLab in September 2020. At KBLab I work with making the library’s collections of visual materials searchable and navigable. In addition to this I also work with training language models and speech recognition models.
My background is in statistics and machine Learning. As a statistician I of course love the programming language R, though nowadays I spend most of my time working with Python.
Chris Haffenden, Research co-ordinator (part-time) ✉️
My position involves helping researchers use the lab’s resources and the library’s digital collections. I assist in dealing with applications for research collaboration, in getting research projects up and running at the lab, and in fixing problems that arise as part of the research process. I also work with communicating and writing articles about the lab’s development projects, as well as running workshops and organizing outreach events to inform the academic community about our tools and resources. I’m always open to new initiatives for collaboration and outreach, so please get in touch!
My academic background is in the field of intellectual and cultural history. I have an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual history from Cambridge University, and a PhD in the History of Science and Ideas from Uppsala University. My doctoral thesis, Every Man His Own Monument (2018), examined novel practices of self-monumentalizing in nineteenth-century Britain to present a new argument about the interconnection of celebrity culture and posthumous fame in this period. Apart from working at KBLab, I have also begun work on a new, RJ-financed project that explores the emergence of self-erasure and the longer history of the right to be forgotten. My involvement with KBLab and my research interests are underpinned by a reflexive concern with the ways in which cultural heritage is produced and made use of.
Emma Rende, Product manager ✉️
My contribution to the lab is within overall strategy and usability. In my work I try to understand who our users are, what their needs are, and how to reach them in the best possible way. I have driven the process of mapping the lab user journey, which changes continuously as the lab develops. I´ve also had a leading part in identifying the core values for the lab. I only work part-time in the lab, but as a product manager I naturally take the lab’s questions into the various forums I participate in at KB.
I have previously worked within the private sector as a business analyst and business developer in e-commerce. Throughout my career, I have always had a focus on the user experience, but with a commercial insight. I have a master’s degree in Computer and Systems Science from Stockholm University.
Justyna Sikora, Data scientist ✉️
I have always been passionate about languages and linguistics. However, having studied philology and worked in the language industry for couple years, I had a chance to stumble upon many uses of what I, at the time, did not know was NLP. I became fascinated by the possibilities of combining linguistic knowledge with computational methods. This interest has led me into pursuing a Master’s degree in Language Technology at Uppsala University. I graduated in 2022 and started working as a data scientist at KBLab.
Patrik Granholm, Researcher ✉️
I work as a researcher at the KBLab and as curator of the medieval and early modern manuscript collection at the National Library. I am the creator of manuscripta.se, a research infrastructure for the study of medieval and early modern manuscripts preserved in Swedish libraries. My role at the lab is mainly focused on maintaining and developing this infrastructure.
My background is in Classics and I have a PhD in Greek from Uppsala University (2012). My main areas of expertise are textual criticism, manuscript studies, and digital manuscript cataloguing in TEI and IIIF. Since 2012 I have worked in several externally funded projects to catalogue and digitise Greek manuscripts, medieval Old Swedish manuscripts, and post-medieval Old Swedish manuscripts. Currently, I am working, part-time, in two large scale cataloguing and digitisation projects, one involving the medieval Latin theological manuscripts at the National Library, another the West Norse manuscripts at the National Library and Uppsala University Library.
Agnes Toftgård, Data scientist ✉️
I am a data scientist at KBLab, where I work with training Swedish language models (such as our speech-to-text model kb-whisper), and with finding ways to integrate AI in the broader activity at the National Library (such as auto-transcribing radio-archives to make them searchable). My background is a MSE from Linköping University in Data-driven Analysis and Machine Learning, where I found that natural language processing was a perfect mix of my interests in languages and computer science.
Jonathan Salisbury, Senior Data scientist ✉️
I work as a senior data scientist at KBLab. My academic background is mainly in philosophy, particularly the philosophy of perception and the data structures underlying our sensory experiences. After leaving academia, I spent ten years working with the development and application of machine learning based solutions in industry. During that time I had the opportunity to work on a wide variety of projects, such as real-time behavioural prediction for website visitors, a near real-time pipeline for anomaly detection on large scale telemetry data from network switches, prediction models for the sale of baked goods, automated layout generation for publishing, using near-infrared for non-destructive testing of avocados… The list goes on. Like most researchers I’m driven by curiosity; if I don’t know it then I want to learn it and if it involves data then I can usually help.
Marie Mattson, Data scientist ✉️
I am a data scientist at KBLab, where my work mostly involves making our collections searchable and usable for researchers. For example, I work with automating the process of cataloguing personal archives. My academic background is in Swedish and Linguistics, which I worked with for two years at the Swedish Language Council. There, my work was focused on the fields of language technology for minority languages, which inspired me to apply to the master’s program of language technology at Uppsala Universtiy.